So what are you accusing him of now? Being linked to Pearlman because he spelled realise with a “z”? Why do you convince yourself of some elaborate plot everytime someone talks to you? You have their imagination of a young child. Endearing, but the fact you are supposed to be an adult past middle age, your grip on reality is not healthy.

So what are you accusing him of now? Being linked to Pearlman because he spelled realise with a “z”? Why do you convince yourself of some elaborate plot everytime someone talks to you? You have their imagination of a young child. Endearing, but the fact you are supposed to be an adult past middle age, your grip on reality is not healthy.

. . .where she specifically mentions the collapse of the pound as a Project Fear component part.

But you obviously know much better than her what was Project Fear and what was common sense.

Or else you are just making shit up on the fly to suit whatever quack argument you are peddling at any given monent in time.

The pound was falling slightly in the months leading up to it the vote in anticipation of a leave vote, it was pretty obvious for all to see what would happen. Ruth Lea has published a statement from the treasury that she sees as project fear as a whole you tool! Doesn’t mean that certain things mentioned weren’t quite likely to happen.

What’s funny is that you’re actually using a pro leave economist to try and and win an argument when you’ve been insulting the intelligence of anyone pro brexit this entire thread.

Have another read and see how stupid you’re being, again.

The analysis in this document comes to a clear central conclusion: a vote to leave would represent an immediate and profound shock to our economy. That shock would push our economy into a recession and lead to an increase in unemployment of around 500,000, GDP would be 3.6% smaller, average real wages would be lower, inflation higher, sterling weaker, house prices would be hit and public borrowing would rise compared with a vote to remain”.

“The analysis also presents a downside scenario, finding that the shock could be much more profound, meaning the effect on the economy would be worse still. The rise in uncertainty could be amplified, the volatility in financial markets more tumultuous, and the extent of the impact to living standards more acute. In this severe scenario, GDP would be 6% smaller, there would be a deeper recession, and the number of people made unemployed would rise by around 800,000 compared with a vote to remain. The hit to wages, inflation, house prices and borrowing would be larger. There is a credible risk that this more acute scenario could materialise”.

Brexit lays bare the extremes that define British society The greater a society’s contradictions, the more disruptive the snap is when it comes By Martin Sandbu

FT, 24 july 2018

Who are you and what have you done to my friend Britain? This is what the country’s one-time admirers from abroad — I am one — are asking as we watch it descend into increasingly vituperative politics and a policy course akin to self-sabotage.

The UK, after all, has always seemed a sensible country more interested in practical questions than grand visions. Against overblown rhetoric on the continent, it offered plain speaking. Its establishment could consistently be counted on to disarm ideological flights of fancy — whether the totalitarianism of right and left or schemes for European federalism — with a bemusement that was equal parts dull and droll.

In short, by its temperament and its political practice, Britain provided temperance in a part of the world too prone to extremes. So what happened? If that temperance has now evaporated, we who count ourselves friends of Britain (as we thought we knew it) should ask whether we were mistaken all along.

It was an indisputable moment of honour for Britain in the 1930s to resist the extreme ideologies that took over most of Europe, in defence of a moderate liberalism. But in our gratitude for this bastion of moderation, perhaps we mistook an exceptional performance for a permanent national character.

Take a closer look, and Britain is a country as much defined by extremes as by their absence. This is true of its history. The English nation chopped off the head of its king more than a century before France did. And Britain was no laggard behind European peers in the cruelty it applied to its colonial projects.

In the second half of the 20th century, the UK arguably delivered the biggest swing of the pendulum (with Sweden) from the most thoroughly socialist economic model in the postwar west to the most radical rollback of the state.

Immigration, too, is a story of one extreme replacing another. Britain was long a safe harbour for people fleeing persecution and poverty, the destination for the Kindertransport and the Habana’s 4,000 Basque refugee children. Even the abominable treatment of the Windrush generation in recent years paradoxically reflects how open the UK once was to people from elsewhere in the Commonwealth. It is because so little was demanded in the way of paperwork to settle in Britain that the absence of documentation could later be used against immigrants.

It is not just changes over time. Britain is riven by contemporaneous extremes, too. It has, in London, Europe’s only true global city; it also has badly neglected left-behind towns and areas cut off from a functioning economy. Its universities are world-class, but it has the worst rates of literacy and numeracy of any large western European country. It marries an inordinately lucrative global financial sector with a subpar economy run on low-wage, low-productivity labour rather than productivity-enhancing capital investment. Then there is the class system and the still-unsettled project of a multinational state.

The inequality between the UK’s different geographic parts is Europe’s most extreme when measured by purchasing power-adjusted regional gross domestic product. West Londoners’ real GDP per capita is more than six times the EU average. Greater London (commuting may distort the central city’s figures) is one of Europe’s most prosperous agglomerations. At the same time, the worst-off British regions have per capita real GDP levels similar to the poorest areas of Portugal and Spain.

Those are a lot of extremes to pack into a middling country that has lost its way. To borrow a Marxian term, the social contradictions are more acute than elsewhere and may have been so more often than not throughout history.

This make sense of the violent swings in national direction in the past, and again in 2016. The more tense are the pent-up springs of opposite extremes forced together, the more disruptive is the snap when it ultimately comes.

If this is true, there are three lessons to draw. The first is that the Brexit mess was unavoidable. In a country of such extreme opposites, any big change of course must involve many painful disruptions. The groans you can hear from Westminster are the sound of the belated realisation that Brexit will be an exercise in delivering disappointments.

The second lesson is that the UK’s future is now deeply unpredictable. Bringing to the surface the repressed tension of British society leaves deep uncertainty about how those contradictions are ultimately resolved. That is the thing with opposed extremes: their force may give the semblance of stability to the revolution simmering underneath. So no one should be confident in predicting where the process set off in June 2016 will take the country a year, a decade or a generation hence.

The third lesson is for outsiders who had become used to seeing Britain as the ballast of good sense in an impetuous Europe and the world at large. We should mourn the fact that we no longer can. When a friend has changed beyond recognition, it feels like bereavement; when it turns out we were misled all along, it feels like deception.

It is reckless to expect the UK’s turmoil to be shortlived. Its partners, in Europe above all, must hope for the best but plan for the worst. We will only know again what sort of country Britain is when our UK friends have agreed what they want it to be. We wish them luck; they are going to need it.

The pound was falling slightly in the months leading up to it the vote in anticipation of a leave vote, it was pretty obvious for all to see what would happen. Ruth Lea has published a statement from the treasury that she sees as project fear as a whole you tool! Doesn’t mean that certain things mentioned weren’t quite likely to happen.

What’s funny is that you’re actually using a pro leave economist to try and and win an argument when you’ve been insulting the intelligence of anyone pro brexit this entire thread.

Have another read and see how stupid you’re being, again.

The analysis in this document comes to a clear central conclusion: a vote to leave would represent an immediate and profound shock to our economy. That shock would push our economy into a recession and lead to an increase in unemployment of around 500,000, GDP would be 3.6% smaller, average real wages would be lower, inflation higher, sterling weaker, house prices would be hit and public borrowing would rise compared with a vote to remain”.

“The analysis also presents a downside scenario, finding that the shock could be much more profound, meaning the effect on the economy would be worse still. The rise in uncertainty could be amplified, the volatility in financial markets more tumultuous, and the extent of the impact to living standards more acute. In this severe scenario, GDP would be 6% smaller, there would be a deeper recession, and the number of people made unemployed would rise by around 800,000 compared with a vote to remain. The hit to wages, inflation, house prices and borrowing would be larger. There is a credible risk that this more acute scenario could materialise”.

[Post edited 24 Jul 2018 23:17]

Obviously i had to use a Brexiter's own definition of Project Fear - Doh - and this one was like gold dust in an ideology almost totally devoid of actual plans, forecasts, fixed points, empirically measurable targets, etc.

As for Lea's comments, my post a couple of pages back was a direct response where I ranked 5.5 Project Fear predications as having come true out of 8 set out by Lea.

And now here you are walking back Lea's definition of Project Fear, for obvious reasons.

I await the next line in the Brexiters playbook of denouncing her as a traitor to the Brexiter cause who was insufficiently ideologically pure to realise that all the forecasts labelled Project Fear back in 2016 that came true were obvious and bound to happen anyway.

Brexit lays bare the extremes that define British society The greater a society’s contradictions, the more disruptive the snap is when it comes By Martin Sandbu

FT, 24 july 2018

Who are you and what have you done to my friend Britain? This is what the country’s one-time admirers from abroad — I am one — are asking as we watch it descend into increasingly vituperative politics and a policy course akin to self-sabotage.

The UK, after all, has always seemed a sensible country more interested in practical questions than grand visions. Against overblown rhetoric on the continent, it offered plain speaking. Its establishment could consistently be counted on to disarm ideological flights of fancy — whether the totalitarianism of right and left or schemes for European federalism — with a bemusement that was equal parts dull and droll.

In short, by its temperament and its political practice, Britain provided temperance in a part of the world too prone to extremes. So what happened? If that temperance has now evaporated, we who count ourselves friends of Britain (as we thought we knew it) should ask whether we were mistaken all along.

It was an indisputable moment of honour for Britain in the 1930s to resist the extreme ideologies that took over most of Europe, in defence of a moderate liberalism. But in our gratitude for this bastion of moderation, perhaps we mistook an exceptional performance for a permanent national character.

Take a closer look, and Britain is a country as much defined by extremes as by their absence. This is true of its history. The English nation chopped off the head of its king more than a century before France did. And Britain was no laggard behind European peers in the cruelty it applied to its colonial projects.

In the second half of the 20th century, the UK arguably delivered the biggest swing of the pendulum (with Sweden) from the most thoroughly socialist economic model in the postwar west to the most radical rollback of the state.

Immigration, too, is a story of one extreme replacing another. Britain was long a safe harbour for people fleeing persecution and poverty, the destination for the Kindertransport and the Habana’s 4,000 Basque refugee children. Even the abominable treatment of the Windrush generation in recent years paradoxically reflects how open the UK once was to people from elsewhere in the Commonwealth. It is because so little was demanded in the way of paperwork to settle in Britain that the absence of documentation could later be used against immigrants.

It is not just changes over time. Britain is riven by contemporaneous extremes, too. It has, in London, Europe’s only true global city; it also has badly neglected left-behind towns and areas cut off from a functioning economy. Its universities are world-class, but it has the worst rates of literacy and numeracy of any large western European country. It marries an inordinately lucrative global financial sector with a subpar economy run on low-wage, low-productivity labour rather than productivity-enhancing capital investment. Then there is the class system and the still-unsettled project of a multinational state.

The inequality between the UK’s different geographic parts is Europe’s most extreme when measured by purchasing power-adjusted regional gross domestic product. West Londoners’ real GDP per capita is more than six times the EU average. Greater London (commuting may distort the central city’s figures) is one of Europe’s most prosperous agglomerations. At the same time, the worst-off British regions have per capita real GDP levels similar to the poorest areas of Portugal and Spain.

Those are a lot of extremes to pack into a middling country that has lost its way. To borrow a Marxian term, the social contradictions are more acute than elsewhere and may have been so more often than not throughout history.

This make sense of the violent swings in national direction in the past, and again in 2016. The more tense are the pent-up springs of opposite extremes forced together, the more disruptive is the snap when it ultimately comes.

If this is true, there are three lessons to draw. The first is that the Brexit mess was unavoidable. In a country of such extreme opposites, any big change of course must involve many painful disruptions. The groans you can hear from Westminster are the sound of the belated realisation that Brexit will be an exercise in delivering disappointments.

The second lesson is that the UK’s future is now deeply unpredictable. Bringing to the surface the repressed tension of British society leaves deep uncertainty about how those contradictions are ultimately resolved. That is the thing with opposed extremes: their force may give the semblance of stability to the revolution simmering underneath. So no one should be confident in predicting where the process set off in June 2016 will take the country a year, a decade or a generation hence.

The third lesson is for outsiders who had become used to seeing Britain as the ballast of good sense in an impetuous Europe and the world at large. We should mourn the fact that we no longer can. When a friend has changed beyond recognition, it feels like bereavement; when it turns out we were misled all along, it feels like deception.

It is reckless to expect the UK’s turmoil to be shortlived. Its partners, in Europe above all, must hope for the best but plan for the worst. We will only know again what sort of country Britain is when our UK friends have agreed what they want it to be. We wish them luck; they are going to need it.

This is all we need. We'll have the morons (whether they're inners or outers, or couldn't-care-lessers) buying up all the bread and milk in the shops. Like they do when there's a chance that the wether might turn a bit nippy.

Everyone just needs to calm the feck down and go and enjoy the summer with a quiet beer or lemonade.

This is all we need. We'll have the morons (whether they're inners or outers, or couldn't-care-lessers) buying up all the bread and milk in the shops. Like they do when there's a chance that the wether might turn a bit nippy.

Everyone just needs to calm the feck down and go and enjoy the summer with a quiet beer or lemonade.

This is actually one of the most serious aspects of UK withdrawal from the EU in general and the Euratom nuclear agency, that has been ringing alarm bells in the health sector for some time.

Seems we have enemies in the WTO who are looking to exploit our weakness after departing the EU. 7 nations (including our allies in the US) are lining up to object the UKs application and schedule of concessions which are based on our previous position of strength and relationship with the EU. Complicated stuff, and i don't claim to understand all of this, but could well rule out a deal with the EU where we share quotas.

Read this thread....

Today the UK and EU moved a step closer to unwinding their joint @wto trade relationship. Each filed documents in Geneva outlining the terms they will use to trade with the rest of the world once Britain leaves the EU.

Seems we have enemies in the WTO who are looking to exploit our weakness after departing the EU. 7 nations (including our allies in the US) are lining up to object the UKs application and schedule of concessions which are based on our previous position of strength and relationship with the EU. Complicated stuff, and i don't claim to understand all of this, but could well rule out a deal with the EU where we share quotas.

Read this thread....

Today the UK and EU moved a step closer to unwinding their joint @wto trade relationship. Each filed documents in Geneva outlining the terms they will use to trade with the rest of the world once Britain leaves the EU.

"Enemies....looking to exploit our weakness" sounds a bit dramatic. Aren't they just countries looking to ensure that our departure from the EU doesn't adversely affect their own agreed trading arrangements with the EU?

"Enemies....looking to exploit our weakness" sounds a bit dramatic. Aren't they just countries looking to ensure that our departure from the EU doesn't adversely affect their own agreed trading arrangements with the EU?

On reflection, I was being a tad melodramatic. They will only be doing the rational thing of trying to win as many gains whilst maintaining that they're only doing to so to prevent themselves from being adversely affected by the new trading relationship.